Dating

 Today I want to talk about the world of dating and what dating really is compared to courting. Because I grew up Mormon, I had very strict rules about dating and having a boyfriend, but I never really listened to my parents and dated anyway. I had the idea that dating is solely for romantic intentions instead of getting to know a person. Now that I'm in college I realize that dates, especially the first one, should just be a fun activity. Obviously, a date implies some sort of interest in a person, but it should be a relaxed and casual environment to properly get to know someone. When I met my boyfriend, I thought he was really attractive, but I didn't have any romantic feelings toward him. He however fell head over heels for me. There was about a solid week of us getting to know each other before we actually started dating. Most of what we did was spend time talking to one another about our lives and how good of friends we had become. Once we started dating, we would go on walks, watch movies, go out to eat, you name it. We dated for about a week and then we decided to call ourselves an item. Now a year later, marriage is up for discussion. I'm glad that I went through the process that I did because it allowed me to have fun with him without there being a lot of social pressure to call him my boyfriend. Because I am Mormon and I go to a Mormon school, I have seen many different people date for a very short amount of time and then immediately get married. There was a friend of mine who knew a person that dated their fiance for a week and got married. That to me is crazy and very inappropriate. It's deemed normal for people at my school to get married in a few months and then start popping out kids not even a year later. It's super unhealthy, especially when those people say that they have received a revelation from God to marry that person. 

I want to make a couple of points about this issue. First of all, soulmates don't exist. There are many people that can be right for a person, it's not a one-and-done deal. For example, I think my boyfriend and I fit really well together and we found each other through a very unlikely coincidence. But if I'm being honest, we only work so well together because we were friends before we dated. This leads me to my next point. You have to know the person for long enough before you marry them. Experts say that you don't truly know a person until three months. People at my school get married faster than that. I have room to talk because I have been dating my boyfriend for over a year. This is something that both of us take very seriously and are trying to plan very carefully because financial security is important to us. That's another issue that I have with people getting married and having families in the school. The people that are doing this don't even have careers yet, how they are supporting themselves is beyond me. 

You can't date someone for a month or two and then decide that you are meant to be, you don't know the person yet. If these people truly believe that they are meant to marry, then that's fine. But if they want their relationship to be successful then they need to get out of the honeymoon phase before they make such a big decision. Infatuation is a very powerful thing, biologically it's what drives us to come together and have a family, and because of that, you need to wait it out and see how the relationship plays out without the butterflies.